Mass Effect General Discussion (spoilers)

Oh, I remember that. There was a massive rewrite at some point in development.

Actually didn't Andromeda have the same issue?

Andromeda didn't have a rewrite so much as it had a massive issue of getting off the ground. Or so goes my understanding. They spent ages and ages trying to do the procedurally generated galaxy thing No Man's Sky was doing and it went nowhere.

On the writing end, all I really heard was it was super unfocused with a lot of new blood writers trying to appease and suck up to vet writers at Bioware and no one really having a focused cohesive vision for things. Though it ALSO sounds like Andromeda was kinda made on the cheap a bit; animation was outsourced entirely and, while they originally had intended nearly a dozen new aliens for the game, only two actually happened.

They have publicly said it was "Because they were out there designs and we love the cosplay community trying to replicate our designs so we cut it back" which is an explanation that REEKS of bullshit. Sounds more like they didn't have the budget or time to do it so they cut back and had to try to spin it in a positive way.

I mean, similarly, Drell, Elcor, Hanar, Volus, and Quarians had to be saved for DLC... And none of them particularly had a cosplay problem before.

This video goes into pretty good depth over Andromeda's development cycle.

Huh I'd like to see an Elcor cosplay.

Edited by slimcoder on Feb 10th 2021 at 11:56:00 AM

It doesn't help the Frostbite engine kind of sucks for the games they want to do.

But its forced upon them because EA doesn't want to pay to license other engines.

Holy fuck holy, according to a comment in that video, this is apparently why Female Ryder's facial animations are so fucked.

"The most conspicuous piece of ineptitude is, for my money, why female Ryder’s facial animations and expressions are so deformed.

Apparently, when they were capturing the mocap actor’s neutrals, the baseline faces used to model every single animation as a deformation of the neutrals, the supervisor there told here to smile.

It’s hard to overstate just how massive the impact of this is. This means that every single animation is now the animation plus a smile. Angry is grimace but happy eyes. Neutral is empty smile. Talking is Smile Talking like an overhyped sales agent. Smiling is smiling twice at once and looks insane. And there’s a reason most of the disaster animations that show up are female Ryder as a result.

The animations aren’t good as they are, but this is why hers are hugely worse. And it’s even more frustrating for it being such a dumb reason."

Edited by slimcoder on Feb 11th 2021 at 12:09:02 PM

The facial animation issue with Andromeda were just fascinating. ME-1 and 2 were not particularly expressive and their fair share of bad moments (Ashley's first close up in ME-1 comes to mind) but they had a neutral, attentive look that worked for most circumstances. In this case Dull Surprise is preferable to what we got.

Hearing they screwed up the already bad facial animation with an ill-advised baseline is groan worthy.

There's something darkly humoristic about the mocap being so screwed because the guy in charge told a woman she should smile more.

There's also the fact that nearly all the nonhuman characters have the exact same damn face, it was especially bad on the asari given how human they look. I would be a bit easier on them for this except even Mass Effect 1 gave it's aliens unique looks.

The animation was also completely outsourced. So bioware themselves probably didn't have the control to correct this shit either.

My understanding is they knew this stuff looked like shit but they had no time or resources to try and hand correct it.

Question. When EDI decides to modify her self-preservation protocols so that she can "risk non-functionality" for Joker, does that count as a subversion of I Cannot Self-Terminate? By which I mean that her doing it in response to the Reapers apparently having self-preservation as their absolute priority and her not wanting to be like them kinda implies to me that her old protocols likely did prevent her from taking suicidal actions.

I find quite funny how the only Drell in the series to not have Thane's face was his son. Every other drell has Thane's slight features, but, Kolyat? Cue massive jaw of justice.

I mean, barring the multiplayer I think Thane and Koylat are the only Drell seen in the series, it's actual Canon that Drell are few in numbers.

The whole thing with every Asari having the same face was weird, given they were using existing assets it shouldn't have been that difficult to import the wider variety from other games. Peebee was the sole outlier, but the previous games made due by designing the main characters and then 2-3 variations of every species with an eye on small differences in superficial coloring and facial markings to make them more distinct. I'm not trying to claim it's easy, but it's hard not to point to the previous games and ask why they the visual design is a step backward.

There were a few other drill. Liara had a friend who was one kidnapped by the Shadow Broker.

As for why not to use old face assets...? Idk.

Maybe laziness? Like, my understanding is that a number of NP Cs are made via a dev character creator (a few devs talk about designing NP Cs in Inquisition this way) so... maybe they didn't have time to hand design NP Cs like they had before and their process couldn't self correct the issue? Thus repeated faces?

Feron.

Hey. So...

Henry Cavill is probably teasing something to do with Mass Effect?

The guys at GamePressure.com used a program called Focus Magic and found the papers in Cavill's photo have ME related terms like "Cerberus", "Reaper", "Geth" and "Tali'Zorah".

So, are there any significant differences to playing the trilogy on the PC as opposed to a console like the PS 3?

Mods, save editors, console commands, active multiplayer.

Mass Effect Legendary Edition | Squadmate Renders

I noticed something about Jack's body while examining her tattoos, something I didn't catch before due to the textures on the Xbox 360 being somewhat fuzzy. She's got scars... LOTS of scars. Including a huge tri-star one just a bit above her belly button, and another large one above her left breast. And given the poor girl's backstory, there are some REALLY unpleasant implications behind the prior one.

I could never not see them. The ones in the back of the neck always got me.

Well the tattoos do make a really good job of camouflaging the majority of them.

So, been playing Andromeda for a while now, and just ended the Contagion sidequest.

And it's interesting as, normally, I would've gone the paragon way and save the woman and pit her on stasis, but after this pandemic, it just felt ong to take any risk, so I let her die tu secure the virus. Even with hints that the virus doesn't work and that with the Angaran physiology there can be a chance to find a cure.

So, just wondering, what would've been your choice before this pandemic, and it would've chaged now or stay the same?

Haven't played Andromeda, based on wiki it looks like the choice is between killing the quest boss that has her hostage (which results in her dying) and keeping her alive but allowing the quest boss to leave with a (as far as you know) sample of the virus? I'd say that's as much a choice to let a hostile faction have a bioweapon that can kill everyone, possibly more so, than just whether to save the hostage or kill the hostage.

I don't think that this (Covid) would likely have changed what I would actually decide to do. At the end of the day, it's a sidequest that's designed to give you exp for making the decision upon confronting the quest boss, not to go back and tell everyone to impose a lockdown while you do contact tracing for everyone who might have gotten it and either quarantine them or everyone else that's not them (whichever is easier).

It didn't change my choice.

However, boy did I sit there internally SCREAMING at how it was written. This quest would have been written VERY differently post-2020.

I was fuming every time EVERYONE dismissed ever publicly saying anything as "That'd just upset people and is unthinkable". 'Scuse me, bitch? Uh, people could be dying because they caught it right now and are spreading it more and we won't know until there's a REAL panic on our hands.

As if my opinion of Addison could get any lower.

"That'd just upset people and is unthinkable".

Prioritizing public reaction (or the perceived public reaction) was the problem with how pretty much every single Western country that wasn't Australia or New Zealand handled it, yes. They did everything they could to convince the public that it was just a flu that could be defeated as easily as washing your hands and standing a little bit apart, and then did the surprise pikachu face when the people treated it as just a flu that can be defeated by washing your hands and standing a little bit apart.

It probably also has to do with how, as Western countries, the US and Canada didn't really experience SARS as anything other than a very distant bystander, and the writing is going to reflect that. Waifu grew up in China, she recalls the general gist of the news when SARS broke was "this was a very serious disease that is happening right now", whereas I distinctly remember the news we got here was "SARS did not kill very many people".

The fact that most of our leaders were downplaying the problem (even outright falsifying the death rates sometimes) didn't help. They had initially said it would be no big deal, and thought it would make them look bad to backtrack after that.

We had experts who told us exactly what we needed to do and how bad it would be if we didn't do it. Our leaders didn't do those things, and it was as bad as predicted.